Rubrics Made Easy

Why don’t teachers like to make rubrics? Because it’s difficult and time consuming. But that all changes with this tool!

Wow! I am pumped! I just returned from the Google Summit in Lethbridge and couldn’t be more excited about the multitude of new tools available with Google for Education. At the summit I presented a session highlighting new way to use Google sheets to lighten your work load when it comes to making rubrics for any classroom activity! Intrigued? Read on!

In my role as Assessment Coach for our school division, it’s my job to help teachers implement best practices when it comes to assessment. To this end I’ve been using doing a lot of research and having great conversations with teachers about how to involve kids in their own assessment. Can our students be involved in the process of collecting, organizing and presenting their evidence of learning. Better yet, can they be responsible for it? Yes. Yes. YES!

How? First of all we have to let them know what their learning goals are. This is where outcome or standards based assessment shines. When we share with our students the targets we want them to hit it gives them confidence to streamline their efforts toward those goals. Clearly identifying those goals and communicating them to your students is the first step to success.

One way to accomplish such a lofty goal is to break open the rubrics! (And yes, it is just one of our goals, but an important one.) Well built rubrics use specific language that allow students to see clearly defined expectations of work quality and depth of understanding. Rubrics are useful, however, not as an after thought for marking student work. Instead rubrics must be used at the beginning of the learning process as a means to involve the students in identifying their learning goals and being invested in the assessment process. When used in this way, rubrics provide the road map for learning success.

The challenge? Designing well built rubrics is downright difficult! Time and time again, teachers express to me how difficult it is to come up with the right wording for their rubric. It’s a time consuming process that must be repeated and tailored to each new activity, project, unit or lesson. My question is… why keep re-inventing the wheel? What if we could have a bank of rubric descriptors that we could use for a variety of different purposes. What if we could use that descriptor bank in a myriad of combinations to populate and make a custom rubric for each unit or all the performance based activities within a unit. Yes… what if? That was my thinking when I decided to make interactive rubrics.

These rubrics are: (use slides)

Interested? Here’s how the interactive rubrics work. Watch this:

Can you see the possibilities? Could this same process be applied to make other useful tools for assessment in the classroom? Absolutely!

The response from teachers throughout our school division—to this time-saving tool— has been phenomenal. They love it! It’s so good that we can’t keep it to ourselves. I’ want to pass these helpful tools on to my subscribers. If you are interested then subscribe here to my newsletter and I’ll send you a very special access to a pre-built science rubrics for any grade 1 – 9 ( Disclaimer: They are built for the Alberta Curriculum, but I suspect that with some minor tweaking in the wording they can fit your curriculum, too. They are totally editable but not edible.) You’ll also get access to a prebuilt blank rubric, and step by step video instructions on how to use them to make your own interactive rubrics for any subject.

As always, those who sign up will find these language posters included.

It’s my goal to empower all of you with the tools you need to make it easy to implement best practice assessment in the classroom. I’m here to help anytime. Just email me at sharon@questteaching.com

Best,

Sharon

P.S. I’d love to hear how you use these rubrics in your classroom. Respond in the comments below or drop me a line!